SOURCE: Pei, Lowry. Review of The Gift of Stones, by Jim Crace. Boston Review 14, no. 4 (August 1989): 23–24.

In the following review, Pei offers a negative assessment of The Gift of Stones.

Jim Crace's first book, Continent, was a group of stories taking place in the present on a fictitious continent at the world's margin; his present book, The Gift of Stones, takes place on a nameless coast on the outskirts of time—at the juncture between the Stone Age and the Bronze Age. The subject of Continent was the Third World, oppression, colonialism—extreme situations, tragic and comic turns; the subject of The Gift of Stones is bleakness and storytelling, and its tone never varies.

The world of this book is even more marginal than that of Continent; it is a prehistoric village of stone-workers who find themselves, at book's end, made superfluous by the coming of bronze tools...